7
Committees and Code Words
‘At what we and our American Allies judge to be the right time, this front will be thrown open and the mass invasion of the Continent from the west, in combination with the invasion from the south, will begin.’
Winston Churchill, speech to House of Commons, 21 September 1943
The timing of when to invade France had vexed the Allied leaders ever since America’s entry into the European war. Immediately, Roosevelt and Churchill had held a series of meetings in Washington DC beginning on 22 December, code-named ‘Arcadia’, which agreed to invade Axis-held North Africa and unify the war effort of their two countries – in the direction of the virtuous, harmonious future its code name suggested. When the required resources became available they would launch an assault on Nazi-occupied Europe, using England as a springboard. It was agreed the most likely point of entry would be somewhere along the French coast. The US Army chief of staff, George C. Marshall, was assisted at the ‘Arcadia’ Conference by his newly appointed Assistant Chief of the War Plans Division, Brigadier General Eisenhower. The latter lobbied hard for a combined command system; as a result, the Combined Chiefs of Staff was established in January 1942, unifying the British Chiefs of Staff Committee with their American opposite numbers, the Joint Chiefs.1
Subsequently, partly in response to huge Russian pressure for a Second Front – the Soviet Union was bleeding heavily and Stalingrad had yet to happen – and partly through ignorance of the vast logistics required, the Combined Chiefs agreed to immediately build up all available Anglo-American forces in England – Operation Bolero; aficionados of Ravel’s classical piece might have divined a reference to the slow-tempo beginning, gradually rising to a crescendo. Also planned was a massive cross-Channel assault in the spring of 1943, utilising perhaps forty divisions, christened ‘Roundup’ (suggesting its American conception). Optimistically, there were also initial plans for an ‘exploratory’ landing in France in 1942 – either at Calais, Le Havre or the Cotentin peninsula – named ‘Sledgehammer’, employing six to ten divisions, should Germany by some miracle suddenly weaken or the Eastern Front suddenly become critical. The author of all these plans was Eisenhower.2
Admiral Bertram Ramsay – who as Flag Officer Dover had rescued the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) from Dunkirk in 1940 – was naval advisor to the Roundup/Sledgehammer strategy. He soon discovered it was being undermined by none other than his own prime minister, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS) – General Sir Alan Brooke, appointed in December 1941 – and the head of Combined Operations, Lord Louis Mountbatten. They were backing an alternative strategy to keep Britain’s war in the Mediterranean predominant, in the expectation that they would make more headway against the Italians, against whom they were making some progress in the summer of 1942.
Marshall – Brooke’s opposite number in America and Roosevelt’s chief military confidant – and the US Navy’s brilliant but overly Anglophobic commander in chief, Admiral Ernest J. King, were bullish about implementing the Roundup/Sledgehammer concepts. Yet, the British argued (with good reason in 1942), the alliance was not ready to tackle the complexities of a cross-Channel invasion. However, with the Germans running riot all over the Soviet Union, the British and Americans had to be seen to take the offensive. As Roosevelt was personally keen on his forces – in concert with the British – taking the field against the Germans in 1942, the Churchill–Brooke option to land Anglo-US troops in French North Africa in November 1942, Operation Torch (clearly an American reference to Lady Liberty returning across the Atlantic), was agreed in place of bouncing across the Channel to France.
Roosevelt personally backed Torch against the advice of Marshall and King – indeed, they had to be ordered to implement it by their president. Largely to prevent the pair from ‘sabotaging’ Torch in any way, Churchill asked that it have an American commander. Marshall thereupon nominated Eisenhower, his most trusted protégé, then serving as commander of US forces in Britain. He was a face already peripherally known to Churchill, and at the time, Ike himself was leaning heavily on the organising genius of his deputy, Mark W. Clark. When he arrived in England on 26 June 1942 the Daily Express carried Major General Eisenhower’s photograph with the caption ‘US Second Front General is Here’.3 They could not have known how prophetic the headline would become.
In this instance, the Express was only trying its best in the face of atrocious war news from Malta, the Atlantic convoys, Russia and North Africa, and Eisenhower’s UK arrival did not herald what the Express assumed. The new front with which Ike would be concerned was far away from France. Reciprocating the gesture that led to Eisenhower’s appointment for Torch, the American Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee agreed that his chief subordinates for maritime, land and air operations should all be British.
Operation Torch witnessed three sets of landings against Casablanca, Oran and Algiers in Vichy-held Morocco and Algeria on 8 November 1942, deep in Rommel’s rear.4 Most GIs staged through Britain and Gibraltar, but Major General George S. Patton’s Western Task Force sailed directly from the United States. Here, Ramsay’s genius at coordinating huge shipping movements showed, working as deputy to the Allied naval commander, Andrew Cunningham. This was America’s first seaborne attack outside the Pacific, and fortunately for them it was only briefly and ineffectively opposed.
The landings were complemented by America’s first airborne assault, made by the 2nd Battalion of the 509th Parachute Infantry. Torch was a vital milestone in Anglo-US military relations, but historically has not received the attention it deserves. Partly this is because the eventual land force commander, General Sir Kenneth Anderson of the British First Army, was not thought to have performed well and was demoted into obscurity after the campaign. There was little initial bloodshed, the Vichy French soon siding with the Allies. An undoubted logistic and planning triumph, the real reason for the dim memory of Torch lies in the fact that it was the French – albeit Vichy-controlled forces – who were the foe on this occasion.
By 13 May 1943 the Anglo-US Torch land forces – Anderson’s First Army – had linked up with Montgomery’s Eighth Army advancing from El Alamein and forced the surrender of the Afrika Korps in Tunis. As its talismanic leader, Rommel, had been ordered home earlier, it was Generaloberst Hans-Jürgen von Arnim who was captured, not the Desert Fox, along with 240,000 of his German and Italian soldiers – enough for Churchill to speak of his own ‘Tunisgrad’. Yet Hitler’s militarily illogical behaviour in reinforcing the failing front, contesting every mile, had surprised and perplexed the Allies, who had expected to be ‘the new masters of ancient Carthage’ (as Churchill pleasingly put it) before the New Year.
Churchill himself had wintered in the region, earlier hosting a series of Anglo-American talks at the turn of the year in Casablanca over 14–23 January 1943, code-named ‘Symbol’. This important summit directed the establishment of an Anglo-American tri-service headquarters under General Frederick Morgan to coordinate planning for future landings in France, code-named ‘Overlord’ (the first appearance of the name), albeit with no firm date. The same conference agreed to an invasion of Sicily – Operation Husky – later in the year, continuing with the same formula of Eisenhower as Supreme Commander, with British service chiefs working under him.5
Later that year, over 12–25 May, Churchill conferred with Roosevelt and Marshall in Washington DC, code name ‘Trident’, and took the opportunity to address a joint session of Congress for a second time. Many of the basic Overlord details were thrashed out at ‘Trident’, the name chosen by Churchill in reference to the tool of the sea god Neptune/Poseidon, on whose goodwill the whole endeavour would rely. Apparently, during lifeboat drill on the transatlantic trip the Prime Minister insisted on having a machine-gun mounted in the boat to which he was allotted – indicative of the mood with which he approached everything during his wartime life: both pugnacious and perverse.
With Churchill safely arrived in Washington, American dominance of the wartime alliance began to be asserted. Not unreasonably, Churchill and Brooke wanted the main military effort to continue in Italy after Sicily – only two months away – with Churchill persisting in his view that a front in the Balkans might also be opened. The Prime Minister also argued (correctly) that because Tunis had fallen much later than expected, it was already too late to switch their forces in North Africa to France for Operation Roundup in the summer of 1943. Roosevelt, Marshall and the US Joint Chiefs grew alarmed that lingering in the Mediterranean would delay their strategic plans for invading France until the following year.
Thus, on 19 May 1943 and somewhat against their wishes, Churchill and Brooke were forced to accept a French invasion date of 1 May 1944. The postponement from 1943 was also due to the logistics of landing craft; most available had been deployed to the Mediterranean for Operation Husky – though the Americans had quietly diverted some to the Pacific – whilst only one US division was ready in Britain, due to the massive build-up of the US Eighth Air Force, Operation Sickle, which had taken much of the available shipping space. Further Overlord details were fleshed out at the subsequent UK–US–Canadian summit in Quebec, code-named ‘Quadrant’, held over 17–24 August 1943.6
Twice, at Churchill’s behest, the British had lobbied to postpone the invasion of France and instead pursue operations in the Mediterranean, initially in favour of Operation Torch, then for the invasion of Sicily. Although there were sound military reasons behind both deferrals, American suspicions had grown by the time of the ‘Trident’ Conference that the Prime Minister was opposed to a cross-Channel invasion, period. His personal history of having instigated the unsuccessful and costly Gallipoli campaign of 1915 might also have been seen as antipathetic to large-scale amphibious activity.
Certainly the lessons from the Anglo-Canadian raid on Dieppe in August 1942, the American reversal at Kasserine in February 1943, and the unexpectedly long German defence of Tunisia must have contributed to Churchill’s scepticism, but the consistency of his own utterances – in favour of operations in the Balkans, bringing Turkey into the war, and a projected assault on Norway, Operation Jupiter – were instrumental in Marshall and Roosevelt concluding that the British had lost faith in the cross-Channel option. This was also the view of the Soviets, for whom the only worthwhile second front was a major invasion of German-held France.
The British capitulation at ‘Trident’ may have been influenced by concerns that – even though for good military logic – if the UK didn’t facilitate cross-Channel landings in 1944, America would renege on its Germany-first policy. Certainly, whatever Roosevelt’s public position, ‘fifteen air groups originally designated for Britain, as well as troops and landing craft’, had been redeployed to the Pacific in 1942, to shore up the Guadalcanal campaign.7 Brooke and Churchill were also aware that the US build-up in Britain – Bolero – had only delivered four US divisions in 1942, perhaps indicative that America was also hedging its strategic bets.
Irrespective of the enthusiasm, or lack of it, of the Prime Minister and his Chief of the Imperial General Staff, the Allied planning organisation for a French invasion came into being on 12 March 1943 with the pugnacious acronym of COSSAC. This stood for Chief of Staff to the Supreme Allied Commander (Designate) – as the commander had yet to be appointed, ‘amounting to a body without a head’, and with only limited authority. However, in military terms a Cossack had an altogether different association, and one not lost on the Soviets. Its chief planner, Lieutenant General Frederick Morgan, and his US deputy, Brigadier General Ray W. Barker, were to prepare for an invasion on 1 May 1944, and incorporate all of the lessons learned from previous seaborne assaults. Morgan, a descendant of the notorious pirate Henry Morgan, remains one of the unsung heroes of the invasion of France, for it was he and his Anglo-American staff who devised the plan – with some later tinkering by Eisenhower, Montgomery and the SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force) team – that remains the Western Allies’ predominant military operation of the Second World War. Ike rated Morgan as ‘an extraordinarily fine officer who had, long before my arrival, won the high admiration and respect of General Marshall. I soon came to place an equal value upon his qualifications.’8
COSSAC emerged, as directed by the Casablanca ‘Symbol’ Conference, guided by Brooke’s challenging observation, ‘It won’t work, but you must bloody well make it!’ Morgan’s task at Norfolk House, 31 St James’s Square, site of the birthplace of George III, was clouded by a few tiny obstacles. He had nothing to direct – initially just an aide, two batmen and a car with driver – nor did his commander yet exist. Indeed in his view, COSSAC was ‘not highly regarded by the War Office’ at all.9 ‘Morgan was a workaholic, often sleeping in his office,’ recalled a member of his staff; ‘he was very energetic and inspired a team who worked very long hours, often well into the evening. There was certainly no official leave in the twelve months I worked on the invasion plans.’10
Starting the process on 17 April, by the time he submitted an outline on 15 July (although the planning work would carry on until COSSAC merged with SHAEF the following February), his Anglo-American staff numbered 320 officers and six hundred other ranks in five departments – land, air, maritime, intelligence and administration – each headed by a two-star commander.11 Later these departments took the American designations for staff branches, intelligence becoming G-2, operations G-3 and so on. Morgan’s first and most comprehensive draft was submitted to the British War Cabinet and Chiefs of Staff Committee as a 143-page document on 15 July 1943 entitled ‘Operation Overlord: Report and Appreciation’ and included thirteen maps referencing the planned outline of the invasion – in reality a feasibility study, rather than a firm plan.
Morgan’s personal staff included his chief of operations staff, Major General C. R. West, and Wren Ginger Thomas. She was a shorthand typist when she joined the WRNS in March 1943, aged twenty-two. After basic training she was posted to Morgan’s staff in Norfolk House. ‘The first time I met him was in a huge room with maps covering the walls. I was the only Wren working on his staff, and in those days a shorthand typist was a very important person; I went everywhere with him, notebook in hand. I took dictation, notes at staff meetings and typed letters. We all realised that it was very hush-hush, very important. Norfolk House was buzzing with activity; I usually had to attend the chief of staff’s conferences in the morning and evening, and the rest of the time I dealt with anything the general wanted answered or typed. The atmosphere was very focused; there was always a feeling of confidence among the staff – there had to be, with an operation of that magnitude.’12
COSSAC had to develop two plans for two scenarios: Operation Rankin, an Allied occupation of Germany if the Nazi regime suddenly collapsed, and Overlord – the name already chosen and pre-dating COSSAC – ‘a full scale assault against the Continent in 1944’.13 Morgan’s staff solved the primary challenge of where to land by ruling out the Pas-de-Calais – so close to England that no surprise was possible – and favouring the Calvados coast. This was a conclusion also arrived at by General Sir Bernard Paget, then commanding 21st Army Group, who in late 1942 had – unbidden – initiated his own investigation into a possible invasion of Northern France. His plan, code-named ‘Skyscraper’, presented to the British Chiefs of Staff in March 1943, bore remarkable similarity to the final version of Overlord, adopted by SHAEF in June 1944. The ‘Skyscraper’ files were passed to Morgan, which greatly simplified COSSAC’s work, though have been completely ignored by historians.14
To prepare those troops for their invasion, Wren Thomas also remembered ‘a BBC appeal had gone out to the public to send in postcards of the coast of France, maps, Michelin guidebooks or any other information that might help with the planning of the operation – I still remember rooms with postcards of Normandy stuck on the wall’.15 The appeal had actually been broadcast in March 1942 when Commander Rodney Slessor, a Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve (RNVR) officer, explained on air how a commando raid had achieved success with the help of ‘thousands of guidebooks, photographs, postcards and holiday snaps’. Would listeners care to peruse their photo albums and cabinets for any images of the French coast and send them in – with helpful annotations – to the BBC? Within thirty-six hours 30,000 letters had arrived by post; by 1944 the tally was ten million.16 Many were, of course, irrelevant and discarded but those retained – particularly some of the postcards reproduced in this book – were incorporated into briefing materials and recognition booklets issued to the assault wave troops.
A further challenge emerged with COSSAC’s choice of beaches: none of them was near a decent harbour, vital for the sustainment of any invasion. It was one of Morgan’s naval planners, Captain John Hughes-Hallett, who brought with him a throwaway comment made in the aftermath of Dieppe in 1942: ‘If we can’t capture ports, we’ll have to take them with us’ – there was general laughter until a voice muttered, ‘Well, why not?’ This would translate into the Mulberry harbours.17 COSSAC’s work was not only vital, but successful, in that it became the basis for Neptune, but as Morgan noted of their efforts, ‘Never were so few asked to do so much in so short a time.’ Ginger Thomas kept in touch with her boss after the war. ‘We used to send letters and Christmas cards to each other. I still have a wonderful letter from him, which I cherish very much, in which he says, “Do you remember that it’s eighteen years now since you and I put Ike on the road to victory?”’18
In selecting Normandy, COSSAC also concluded that a massive investment in deception would be needed to fool their opponents, which would become Operation Fortitude. The drawback of Normandy was its hinterland. Tactically, the bocage of thick hedgerows and sunken lanes, which limited visibility and manoeuvre, could restrict the Allies to their beachhead, enabling the Germans to counter-attack and push them into the sea. Operationally, the terrain and road network – running east–west, rather than the required north–south – did not lead the Allies towards Germany. The roads out of Calais did – which would help the deception campaign, but it meant that Anglo-American forces landing in Normandy would be fighting against the grain of the land and infrastructure. The hedgerow country would also inhibit the Allies from constructing temporary airstrips for their fighters.19
The fiasco of the August 1942 Dieppe raid had proved that the Allies needed air supremacy, German coastal defences needed softening up beforehand, and tanks and assault engineering equipment had to be landed in the first wave – all twenty-nine tanks landed at Dieppe proved incapable of even getting off the shingle beach.20 The future invasion would have to be an overwhelming concentration of force at a given point, backed up by a massive logistics chain, while German reinforcements would have to be prevented from reaching the battle zone. The tenacity with which they held Dieppe, and the extent of its defences – later much strengthened – suggested that it was extremely unlikely that the Allies would be able to capture a working port intact, capable of handling the invading army’s needs.
The solution, as Hughes-Hallett had concluded, was for the Allies to build their own ports and float them to the invasion area – hence the two artificial Mulberry harbours, thrashed out in a development conference at the amphibious Combined Training Centre, near Largs, Scotland. This was the ‘Rattle’ Conference of 28 June–2 July, held on the eve of the invasion of Sicily, ‘a combination of intensive study and a 1920s house party’. Hosted by Lord Louis Mountbatten and Generals Frederick Morgan and Harold Alexander, who chaired seminars dealing with COSSAC’s various challenges, the conference was nicknamed the ‘Field of the Cloth of Gold’ because of the number of high-ranking officers taking part. Both Churchill and Eisenhower attended, amongst eight admirals, twenty generals, eleven air marshals, with brigadiers and air commodores galore. Under the shadow of the monument commemorating the 1263 defeat of the Norsemen, the military staff were entertained with pipe bands and champagne suppers.
Besides finalising Mulberry, the delegates, who also numbered fifteen Americans and five Canadians, identified the need for the various Fortitude deceptions, special aircraft recognition measures, modified landing craft, the establishment of beach groups, also concluding that Normandy rather than Calais offered their best hope of success. Away from the distractions of London, more progress was made during ‘Rattle’ towards the eventual success of Overlord than on any other single occasion.21
The Mulberries were only conceived as temporary expedients until a fixed harbour could be captured and operated, which all the staff hoped would be Cherbourg. To ensure a flow of fuel to the armies in France, the concept of shore-to-shore submarine pipelines was already under way, known as PLUTO (Pipe-Line Under The Ocean). This idea did not originate with COSSAC and was under active experimentation in the Bristol Channel before Morgan’s command was established.22 Morgan’s team anticipated delivering five thousand tons per day of petroleum, oil and lubricants from D+20, and ten thousand tons per day by D+90. Some would arrive by tanker as well as by PLUTO, but these figures would later prove grossly inadequate.
The floating harbour idea can be traced to Churchill’s famous memo of 30 May 1942 to Mountbatten at Combined Operations HQ: ‘Piers for use on beaches. They must float up and down with the tide. The anchor problem must be mastered. Let me have the best solution worked out. Don’t argue the matter. The difficulties will argue for themselves.’ Progress at first was slow as discussions on competing ideas by the many interested parties were considered. Prototypes were built in remote areas of north Wales and tested in the even more unpopulated region of Wigtown Bay, south-west Scotland.
Churchill was irritated by the apparent lack of progress and penned a number of increasingly irate messages culminating on 10 May 1943: ‘This matter is being much neglected. Dilatory experiments with varying types and patterns have resulted in us having nothing. It is now nearly six months since I urged the construction of several miles of pier.’23 In fact as early as 1917, Churchill had drafted detailed plans for the capture of two islands, Borkum and Sylt, which lay off the Dutch and Danish coasts. He envisaged using a number of flat-bottomed barges or caissons which would form the basis of an artificial harbour when lowered to the seabed and filled with sand. Events moved on and Churchill’s proposal was filed away and never published. The very fact that the strongest German defences were concentrated around ports suggested that an attack elsewhere, where defences were somewhat weaker, would stand a greater chance of success. Harbours apart, landing craft design also had to be improved – something else Churchill had taken periodic interest in – and British shipyards had no spare capacity.
To appease his Russian allies and prove that plans for the Second Front were under way, Churchill nailed his colours to the mast with his 7 June 1943 communication to Stalin: ‘Most Especially Secret. We are planning to construct very quickly two large synthetic harbours on the beaches of this wide sandy bay of the Seine estuary. Great ocean liners will be able to discharge and run by numerous piers supplies to the fighting troops. This must be quite unexpected by the enemy, and will enable the build-up to proceed with very great independence of weather conditions.’24
The Quebec conference, ‘Quadrant’, had confirmed the need for two artificial harbours, code-named ‘Mulberries’, one each for the American and British-Canadian forces, and both designed to handle twelve thousand tons of cargo per day. The sites chosen incorporated two of the landing beaches, Omaha and Gold. The principal element of each Mulberry would be a fixed breakwater, made from seven thousand-ton hollow concrete caissons, code-named ‘Phoenixes’, which were to be towed across the Channel, flooded and sunk in position, resting on the seabed. Of the 210 eventually constructed in England, thirty-nine were deployed to the American Mulberry but not all the remainder arrived in Normandy – several were lost in transit and lie at the bottom of the Channel, whilst a few remain around England’s south coast, manufactured as ‘spares’ and never used.
Each Phoenix was to be equipped with an anti-aircraft gun, ranged five storeys high, two hundred feet long and sixty-nine feet in beam. More than 330,000 cubic yards of concrete and thirty-one thousand tons of steel would go into their construction under conditions of the highest secrecy – workers had no idea what they were making; some guessed it might be ‘a causeway across the Channel’. Mick Crossley was with 416 Battery of the 127th Light Anti-Aircraft Regiment manning a 40mm Bofors anti-aircraft gun on a Phoenix caisson with seventeen others, as it was towed across the Channel. Despite the slow tow by a tug, the rough seas eventually overwhelmed their concrete box, and while Crossley and four of his mates survived, the others drowned.25
Floating piers with seven miles of flexible roadway stretching into the Channel from the shore would complete each port, making them capable of quickly unloading ocean-going vessels and LSTs. Manufacturing of all the various steel and concrete Mulberry harbour elements took place at over five hundred sites in the United Kingdom, and at one time 45,000 men were employed on these tasks. Whether this was a worthwhile diversion of such a huge proportion of the nation’s scarce resources and manpower remains to be seen. The basic concept was hinted at by the popular Picture Post magazine in May 1944, when in all innocence it observed: ‘Something comparable to the city of Birmingham hasn’t merely got to be shifted, it’s got to be kept moving when it’s on the other side. We must take everything with us – and take it in the teeth of the fiercest opposition.’26
In addition, fifty-nine old merchantmen and warships – the vessels were code-named ‘Corncobs’ – would be scuttled bow-to-stern in three fathoms (eighteen feet), along the five landing beaches. The resultant breakwaters, code-named ‘Gooseberries’, would form barriers against the waves and create in effect five miniature harbours.27 The two Gooseberry breakwaters at Omaha and Gold would eventually form part of the American and British Mulberry harbours. A huge fleet of 150 ocean-going tugs – most of those working in British and American east coast waters – would be required to tow the Phoenixes and Corncobs across the Channel, as well as the many component parts of the piers. Whereas much of the vast arsenal used in France was of American manufacture, all of the Mulberry components were inspired by Churchill, and British-designed and -made – which is why they receive so much attention in British war literature.28
The two Mulberry harbours, based around these concrete Phoenix caissons sunk onto the seabed off Omaha and Gold beaches, would make a huge difference to Allied logistics. The Germans knew that ports were vital to any Allied success, but never conceived their opponents might bring their own with them. (Getty Images)
The various memos and records of the Prime Minister’s interest in landing craft design and the artificial harbours, and of his observations from as early as 1940 that sooner or later Britain and her allies would have to mount an amphibious assault against Nazi-occupied Europe, are included in the six volumes of his The Second World War, which appeared during 1948–53. Whilst they demonstrate his undoubted strategic foresight, the wealth of documents Churchill directed to be published as appendices in each volume are there for another purpose altogether. As we have seen, for several reasons the Prime Minister had gained a reputation in American wartime eyes of being ‘against Overlord until the last minute’. Several American post-war memoirs from the credible circles of Roosevelt, Eisenhower and Bradley cited the British premier’s opposition as fact.
In order to refute such allegations of disloyalty – particularly important during his second 1951–5 premiership, when standing firm against Communism with his wartime ally – Churchill ‘seeded’ each volume of his history with selected documentation to demonstrate he had been committed to a cross-Channel assault from the very start, that he was the visionary, the torch-bearer from as far back as 1940. Indeed, in Volume 5 he explicitly observed there were those who thought ‘(a) that I wanted to abandon “Overlord”, (b) that I wanted to deprive “Overlord” of vital resources, or (c) that I contemplated a campaign by armies operating in the Balkan peninsula. These are legends. Never had such a wish entered my mind.’ As the historian David Reynolds has ably demonstrated, the documents Churchill included were the subject of much debate and scrutiny by the writing team who helped him on The Second World War, with some even doctored (to the extent of paragraphs and sentences omitted) to enhance the premier’s post-war reputation, making Churchill’s ‘truth’ about his support for Overlord, and other matters, much less objective.29
Lieutenant General Frederick Morgan’s ideas that evolved into Overlord dated from the time when he had commanded a corps-sized defensive sector of Britain in 1941 and war-gamed a projected German cross-Channel invasion to test his troops. The scale of planning and mounting a successful amphibious operation became apparent to him and he was under no illusions as to the complexity of his task. The original COSSAC plan (incorporating, as we have seen, much of Paget’s earlier ‘Skyscraper’ study) involved dropping two airborne divisions, and landing three infantry divisions on long stretches of sand – the future Omaha, Gold and Juno beaches – amounting to a thirty-mile front, followed by two tank brigades, two infantry divisions in reserve and twenty-one others committed to the ensuing campaign – all these numbers being governed by the amount of assault shipping and air transportation available. Importantly, Morgan also laid down three prerequisites for a successful assault: ‘a substantial reduction in German fighter strength over northwest Europe; not more than twelve mobile German divisions in Northern France, of which no more than three should oppose the invasion on D-Day, and at least two effective “synthetic harbours”’.30
Notwithstanding the reasons for lobbying against invasions of France in 1942 and 1943, Operations Sledgehammer and Roundup, Churchill and Brooke may indeed have stayed – or become – lukewarm after perusing Morgan’s draft COSSAC plan, submitted on 15 July 1943. True, Morgan had limited staff at his disposal, few resources and little authority; but he also understood he had restricted amounts of shipping and landing craft at his disposal. If the timidity of the first COSSAC plan alarmed Churchill – quite possibly putting him off the cross-Channel concept – it might have been because of the parameters he himself helped set at the ‘Quadrant’ Conference. Four days after Morgan submitted his draft, Churchill responded with a minute to the Chiefs of Staff, ‘I do not believe that twenty-seven Anglo-American divisions are sufficient for Overlord’, pleading ‘the extraordinary fighting efficiency of the German Army and the much larger forces they could so readily bring to bear against our troops, even if the landings were successfully accomplished’.31
In addition to Morgan’s three prerequisites for a successful invasion, Churchill instigated one of his own: that Stalin must initiate a Russian attack in support of the second front for which he had been lobbying so hard. Whether this was in expectation of a Russian refusal, which might cast doubt on Overlord, remains to be seen. In the event, the Soviets complied with their own spectacular Operation Bagration, launched on the third anniversary of the German invasion of Russia, Operation Barbarossa, 22 June. What is significant, though, is that when Eisenhower and Montgomery separately inspected Morgan’s plans, neither was disheartened, and both expanded the original plan into what became Overlord, using the authority and resources denied to Morgan and COSSAC.32
Churchill finally revealed to Roosevelt what was probably his true hand in a cable of 23 October 1943. In it he observed that he was less concerned about the Alliance achieving a contested landing, but his anxiety lay in holding out against the substantial German reserves that might be sent by road and rail ‘between the thirtieth and sixtieth day’.33 Roosevelt and his Joint Chiefs remained unmoved, and despite Churchill’s efforts to argue for continued priority in the Mediterranean, the British premier was finally overwhelmed at the Tehran Conference, code-named ‘Eureka’, of 28 November–1 December 1943. It was there – the first meeting of the wartime ‘Big Three’ – on 29 November that Stalin demanded to know who would command Overlord, the Russian leader not unreasonably surmising that an operation without a leader was not rooted in fact. This decision was really Roosevelt’s, for America would be supplying the lion’s share of the resources. It was assumed the Overlord job was Marshall’s; that Eisenhower would replace him as US Army chief of staff in Washington DC; and General Sir Harold Alexander would succeed Ike in the Mediterranean.
In the event, the President decided he preferred to lean on Marshall at home, and the latter recommended Eisenhower for Overlord. Churchill’s public explanation was that in view of America’s contribution, the overall commander for the French invasion should be a US officer. In private, as far back as the ‘Quadrant’ Conference in Quebec of 17–24 August, there is documentary evidence the Prime Minister had offered to ‘trade’ American domination of Overlord for British supremacy in the Mediterranean theatre. There may also have been a frisson of Schadenfreude at work. If for any reason Overlord failed, a British commander – if not Churchill himself – would be under severe criticism from the American public. Having Overlord led by an American was a good insurance policy, were anything to go wrong.34
Here is the nub of Churchill’s gut instinct towards the cross-Channel invasion. He may not have been as warm to it as the Americans, but he was not against it. However, the Prime Minister was far more enthralled by the Mediterranean theatre, which he felt held more promise, and was a known quantity. The Anglo-US forces fighting there already had a measure of their opponents and the ground, and in September 1943 the Italians would crack, forcing Mussolini’s resignation. True, the Germans subsequently flooded into the country and, as in Tunisia, would contest every yard of Italian terrain, but progress was being made. Of course, the prize was not Italy itself, but access to the German–Austrian southern flank, which was being brought into range of Allied heavy bombers stationed on Italian airfields around Foggia.
Why risk all of this, reasoned Churchill and Brooke, in favour of the uncertainties of a cross-Channel attack? Ugly geopolitics also lay at the root of this strategic thinking. The Mediterranean was a British-dominated theatre, and the ‘trade’ in handing Overlord to the Americans had ensured that it would remain so. In Winston Churchill’s heart of hearts, he still hoped the attritional slogging match of the Western European war would be decided in the boxing ring of the Mediterranean, under British leadership, even if Overlord were to deliver the final knockout blow. Churchill’s nominee for the French invasion until ‘Quadrant’ had been his own CIGS, Sir Alan Brooke, who was also a passionate supporter of the Mediterranean-first policy. However, the long-overdue publication of Brooke’s own diaries in 2001 reveal that he was privately sceptical of the American military machine and its various personalities. As Supreme Commander, most probably, he would have tried to pursue the North West European campaign as a British-dominated one. If his private thoughts are anything to go by, he was nothing like as committed to the idea of Allied unity as Eisenhower.
The principal beneficiary of Churchill’s ‘trade’, which also continued the winning formula from the Mediterranean, was the Kansan Dwight David Eisenhower, then aged fifty-three, who emerged on 4 December 1943 as Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force.35 Controversially, ‘Ike’ was a desk soldier, and easily the best staff officer of his generation, but who had ‘missed’ the First World War and whose first operational command was as the guiding hand for Operation Torch, though he had briefly commanded small units in peacetime. In short, he was not the sort of bemedalled, moustachioed figurehead the British would have chosen; rather, he owed his fortuitous appointment entirely to his mentor, Marshall, under whom he had gained experience of planning, and dealing with Washington DC. Culturally, the British and US armies were and have remained quite different: the former insisting that officers alternated between staff and command appointments all the way through their careers; in the latter, officers might be streamed early on into branches that best reflected their abilities, and could thus progress far up the staff chain without constantly switching to command appointments.
Britain’s CIGS, Sir Alan Brooke, watched Eisenhower at a conference in May 1944. There was perhaps just a hint of sour grapes – through not having the Supreme Command, which Churchill had implied earlier might be his – in his observation of the SHAEF commander: ‘The main impression I gathered was that Eisenhower was a swinger and no real director of thought, plans, energy or direction! Just a coordinator – a good mixer, a champion of inter-Allied cooperation, and in those respects few can hold a candle to him. But is that enough? Or can we not find all the qualities of a commander in one man? Maybe I am getting too hard to please, but I doubt it.’36 In retrospect, Brooke’s bias seems shocking and indefensible. However, what were the prerequisites for Eisenhower’s post? There was no job description. No one would dispute that Ike’s core belief was the sanctity of the Anglo-US relationship, which for him assumed the status of a religion when he took up his new post in England on 14 January 1944. Incidentally, this also marked the last day of COSSAC – although it effectively continued to function as the genesis of SHAEF.
At the other end of the scale, Group Captain Desmond Scott, a New Zealander in charge of the Typhoon-equipped No. 123 Wing, based at RAF Thorney Island, West Sussex, remembered a visit from Ike before D-Day. ‘The impression he made on me was a revelation. Some people you take to immediately – Eisenhower was one of them. Most of the British generals I met during my time in England were as stiff and unbending as the silly little sticks they carried. Eisenhower’s authority, humility and broad friendly smile made you feel when meeting him that you had made his day.’37 The American was a ‘natural’ with soldiers, as Major George P. Chambers of the 8th Durham Light Infantry, in the 50th Northumbrian Division, recalled when the Supreme Commander addressed his battalion. ‘At this stage the troops were bored stiff, bolshie, and had had all this so many times before. But, you know, at the end of his speech, the troops burst into spontaneous applause, which was tremendous praise of the man. His personality carried across to the troops.’ William Brown, Chambers’ company sergeant major (CSM), echoed this: ‘He was great. There was no bullshit about him. You’d have thought he was cut out of chocolate.’38
General Dwight David Eisenhower (1890–1969) with his principal wartime aide Commander Harry C. Butcher, USNR (1901–85). ‘Ike’ was well-regarded and blessed with a naturally sunny countenance. More than anyone he held the wartime alliance together. The British field marshal Brooke thought him ‘a good mixer, a champion of inter-Allied cooperation, and in those respects few can hold a candle to him’. (US Army Signal Corps)
As we shall see, there was an inclination amongst some British commanders – not all, but notably Brooke and his protégé Montgomery – to look down their noses at American colleagues, whom they regarded as inexperienced newcomers, though they had to be careful of their Prime Minister’s own outlook, for Winston was himself half American. Harold Macmillan, Churchill’s resident minister in the Mediterranean, inadvertently revealed the British attitude: ‘You will always permit your American colleague not only to have superior rank to yourself and much higher pay, but also the feeling that he is running the show. This will enable you to run it yourself.’39
Eisenhower’s undisputed qualities lay in being an outstanding organiser and planner, the pick of the US Army after Marshall – and in his ability to lead a multinational coalition of forces, each with their own national jealousies, characteristics and sensitivities. Indeed, Ike was – as he became – a politician in uniform, as Montgomery noted in a letter to Brooke of 4 April 1943: ‘Eisenhower came and stayed a night with me on 31 March. He is a very nice chap, I should say probably quite good on the political side. But I can also say, quite definitely, that he knows nothing whatever about how to make war or to fight battles; he should be kept away from all that business if we want to win this war. The American Army will never be any good until we can teach the generals their stuff.’40
Here is the nub of Anglo-US wartime tensions, for Alexander had also handwritten to Brooke in similar terms (marked ‘Most Secret’), by coincidence the day before Monty, observing that the Americans were ‘very nice, very matey, but they simply do not know their job as soldiers, and this is the case from the highest to the lowest, from the General to the private soldier’.41 These may have been fair criticisms in April 1943 when the US Army was fresh to combat and command, but what their British colleagues failed to appreciate was that the Yanks were very quick learners.
Major Tom Bigland was one of the first British officers to attend the US Command and Staff College, Fort Leavenworth, in 1943–4, and went on to become a liaison officer between Montgomery and Bradley. ‘It began to dawn on me that the Americans were at the same stage of war in 1944 at which we had been in 1941–2, but that, while we [the British] were then fighting a superior German, better prepared for war and with superior equipment, they [the Americans] were now superior in men and equipment, and in the air.’42 The superbly trained and equipped GIs who landed in Normandy were quite different in combat wisdom, equipment, organisation, doctrine and tactics to their alter egos who had landed in North Africa, then Sicily and Italy. Even while battling in France the US Army matured, adapted and learned – and far quicker than their British counterparts.
Most were won over by Eisenhower’s natural charm and humility. Sergeant Norman Kirby, in charge of Montgomery’s personal security detail, recalled that while de Gaulle refused to show his identity card, expecting to be recognised, Eisenhower had no such pretensions when challenged. He wrote later of ‘Eisenhower putting his hand on my shoulder, handing me his wallet and saying “Help yourself, son”’.43 Montgomery, too, was occasionally won over. The two dined quietly together on 2 June 1944 in Monty’s headquarters on the eve of the invasion, after which the Briton uncharacteristically wrote of his boss, ‘Eisenhower is just the man for the job; he is a really “big” man and is, in every way, an Allied commander – holding the balance between the Allied contingents. I like him immensely; he is a generous and lovable character and I would trust him to the last gasp.’44
Yet they were fundamentally different. Eisenhower’s busy life was fuelled by caffeine, chain-smoking Camel cigarettes, and, of an evening, the odd glass of Johnnie Walker Black Label Scotch – a taste he acquired during SHAEF days – while he was never far from his British driver and companion, Captain Kay Summersby. Many commanders acquired pets as another form of stress release: Montgomery was famous for his various dogs including a spaniel named Rommel, and a wire-haired fox terrier that answered to Hitler – presented to him by BBC reporters attached to his HQ; Eisenhower also relaxed with his headquarters cat, called Shaef.45 Montgomery was more solitary; he neither smoked nor drank and retired each night at 9 p.m. One of his staff officers, Goronwy Rees, observed:
What was impressive was the air he had of extraordinary quietness and calm, as if nothing in the world could disturb his peace of mind … And as one talked to him, one was aware all the time of the stillness and quietness that reigned all around him, in the study itself, in the entire household, in the garden outside, as if even the birds were under a spell of silence; it was a kind of stillness one would associate more easily with an interview with a priest than a general.46
Perhaps of equal importance to Eisenhower’s appointment, it was at Tehran on 30 November – Churchill’s sixty-ninth birthday – that Brooke recorded, ‘We had a difficult time trying to arrive at some agreement which we could put before our Russian friends in the afternoon. After much agreement we decided that the cross-Channel operation could be put off to 1 June. This did not meet all our requirements, but was arranged to fit in with supporting the Russian spring offensive.’47 If necessary – and the decision was in the balance for a while – this would give Eisenhower and his planners more time to firm up Overlord, and Ramsay and his naval logisticians an extra month to assemble the shipping they would need. In fact, it was only on 31 January 1944 that the Combined Chiefs agreed to postpone Overlord for the required month.
Sir Bernard Montgomery, flushed with the triumphs of his Eighth Army, had been agitating for the post of commanding the 21st Army Group, formed in England on 31 July 1943 to oversee the training of those Anglo-Canadian forces allocated to it. He was contending against his slightly senior contemporary Sir Harold Alexander. Brooke’s private diary for 11 December 1943 is revealing in this respect and gives the lie that he was Monty’s uncritical fan. ‘Ike’s suggested solution [for leadership in the Mediterranean] was to put [Field Marshal Sir Henry Maitland] Wilson in Supreme Command, replace Alex by Monty, and take Alex home to command the land forces for Overlord,’ wrote Brooke. ‘This almost fits with my idea except I would invert Alex and Monty, but I don’t mind much.’48 Thus Monty’s position in history was a lot less assured than one might assume.
In fact, the 21st Army Group already had a chief, the former Commander in Chief of Home Forces, whom we have already met – Sir Bernard Paget, appointed on 23 July 1943. He was exactly Montgomery’s age, and someone of whom Sir Alan Brooke was inordinately fond, yet had a reputation for being ‘difficult’ and a dislike of Eisenhower. Brooke noted:
I wish it had been possible to leave him in command for D-Day. I had a great personal admiration and affection for him which made it all the more difficult to have to replace him at the last moment. He had, however, no experience in this war of commanding a large formation in action. I felt it essential to select some general who had already proved his worth and in whom all had confidence. I had selected Monty for this job in my own mind, but thought I might well have trouble with Winston and Ike (or Marshall) who might prefer Alexander.49
The prospect of an Alexander-led 21st Army Group is intriguing; it would have been an entirely different formation. Although perhaps not as lively in the planning stages – Montgomery’s forte was certainly that of an excellent trainer – there would have been little of the Anglo-American rancour that Monty consistently generated in the subsequent campaign. The multilingual Alexander in Italy had already proved as adept as Eisenhower at managing a multinational coalition that included the Free French and Poles, as well as Canadians. Crucially, he also saw eye to eye with Bradley, Patton and Clark. Perhaps the fighting would still have continued until May 1945, but the roll-out of Eisenhower’s war would have been different: it is difficult to see Alexander backing Operation Market Garden (the September airborne drop on the Netherlands) as Montgomery did, and undoubtedly, the North-West European campaign would have been a more harmonious, less fractious affair for Eisenhower and his colleagues.
However, Monty was agitating for the 21st Army Group role, whereas Alexander was not, already with his hands full leading the 15th Army Group in Italy (and under whom Montgomery was serving as commander of the Eighth Army). Besides, whatever Churchill’s own wishes, the ardent socialists in Churchill’s War Cabinet felt that elevating General the Honourable Sir Harold Rupert Leofric George Alexander, Irish Guardsman, son of the 4th Earl of Caledon, to lead Britain’s premier force in Europe was beyond the pale, and instead they backed the less polished Montgomery, the ‘Citizen’s General’.
Just as Montgomery never revised his views of Eisenhower, Ike’s initial impressions of Monty would colour their future working relationship. The American confided to Marshall in March 1943,
Montgomery is of different calibre from some of the outstanding British leaders you have met. He is unquestioningly able, but very conceited. For your most secret and confidential information, I will give you my opinion, which is that he is so proud of his successes to date that he will never willingly make a single move until he is absolutely certain of success – in other words, until he had concentrated enough resources so that anybody could practically guarantee the outcome.
However, Eisenhower conceded, referring to the Mediterranean theatre, ‘This may be somewhat unfair to him, but it is the definite impression I received. Unquestionably he is an able tactician and organiser and, provided only that Alexander will never let him forget for one second who is the boss, he should deliver in good style.’50
As it was, the cards for command of the 21st Army Group fell Monty’s way through Churchill’s urging on 18 December, with Brooke cabling him privately on the 23rd. Within the week he had relinquished Eighth Army command in Italy to his protégé Sir Oliver Leese, and flown to Marrakesh, where the Prime Minister was recovering from pneumonia, arriving on the evening of 31 December. There, Montgomery was shown a copy of the outline invasion plans drawn up by COSSAC. He immediately drew up a paper arguing that the plan was too modest and the front too narrow, and that more troops should be employed in attacking on a wider front, with a far greater number of follow-on units and reserves available. Even Bernard Paget in ‘Skyscraper’ had foreseen this, so Monty’s insight was hardly unique. Eisenhower had meanwhile come to the same conclusion.
In fact, back in October 1943, Ike had been shown the original COSSAC plans for his opinion. This was when he was still Supreme Allied Commander in the Mediterranean, and Marshall, not Eisenhower, was expected to command Overlord. Back then, the American had observed that the proposed three-division assault was too weak, suggesting an increase to five divisions, with two in reserve. Prior to the Monty–Churchill meeting, Eisenhower and his chief of staff, Walter Bedell Smith, conferred with Monty in Algiers to discuss Overlord on 27 December, again agreeing the COSSAC plan was too modest.
When Monty was shown the plans on 31 December by Churchill, he claimed never to have seen them before, writing in his Memoirs that he ‘had not seen the plan, and had not discussed the subject with any responsible naval or air authority’. Monty then wrote a memo for the Prime Minister overnight, hand-delivered on 1 January 1944, which began: ‘Today, 1 January 1944, is the first time I have seen the appreciation and proposed plan or considered the problem in any way.’51 Churchill recorded that Montgomery said at once, ‘This will not do. I must have more in the initial punch.’52 Yet this is ‘Montyfied’ history and utter nonsense, for it overlooks the Monty–Eisenhower meeting of 27 December, and the fact that Montgomery’s appreciation was simply a summary of the earlier meeting. Montgomery’s falsification of the historical record was in order to create the impression that he was the true architect of Overlord, and he alone had identified the flaws of the COSSAC plan.
He would go on to denigrate COSSAC’s work – though Frederick Morgan himself was on record as saying his invasion proposals were framed on too narrow a front, deploying too few troops in the first waves, but they reflected what he had been given: enough naval lift only for a three-division attack. Bernard Paget had observed the same even earlier in his semi-official Skyscraper study. Eisenhower would observe that Morgan ‘had been compelled to develop his plan on the basis of a fixed number of ships, landing craft and other resources. Consequently he had no recourse except to work out an attack along a three-division front.’53 In fact, Morgan’s work was invaluable, for it had identified where and when to attack and solved many of the complex logistical conundrums, including the artificial harbours, and need for a deception campaign. He also bequeathed SHAEF a fully functioning staff.
The eventual three British/Canadian beaches had been coded ‘Gold’, ‘Jelly’ and ‘Sword’ – all types of fish. However, Churchill disapproved of the word ‘Jelly’ for a strip of sand on which many men could die, so he had it changed to ‘Juno’, after the Roman goddess, often portrayed clutching a weapon. The origins of ‘Omaha’ and ‘Utah’ are less clear – originally they were designated ‘X-Ray’ and ‘Yoke’, from the phonetic alphabet of the day. There was, additionally, provision for a sixth, spare beach, code-named ‘Band’. Situated to the east of the Orne river estuary, between Merville and Cabourg, it has disappeared from history because it was not used – though given the subsequent struggle for Caen, perhaps it ought to have been.
Code names for operations were a relatively new practice, pioneered by the Germans during the First World War. Although the words listed in the US and British code indices were chosen randomly, Churchill was fascinated by them and personally selected ones for major operations. Borrowing the practice from the Germans – whose names he knew well from writing his First World War history (‘Winston has written another book about himself and called it The World Crisis,’ quipped his critics) – Churchill saw the names of culturally significant figures as useful sources. He had clear ideas about what constituted appropriate code names, and after coming across several he considered unsuitable, demanded that all future names be submitted to him for approval. He dropped this requirement when he learned the magnitude of the task. Only Winston Churchill, at the height of a world war but ever the wordsmith, could have devoted himself to writing this sparkling memo, to Major General Hastings Ismay, his chief military assistant, on 8 August 1943:
Churchill’s hand was without doubt evident in the names for the forthcoming invasion. The Normandy landings, dominated as they were by the sea, became ‘Neptune’. The plan for the overall invasion of Europe was originally ‘Roundhammer’, a combination of the code names for assaults planned in previous years, Roundup and Sledgehammer; while Churchill’s personal response to ‘Roundhammer’ is not recorded (the Official British History thought it a ‘revolting neologism’), with remarkable inspiration at the Casablanca Conference he substituted ‘Overlord’. Undoubtedly the best-known code name of the war, it does suggest the majesty and irresistible power that he no doubt intended. Certainly one can see the backs of military officers straightening up, even before they read the contents, when presented with a document named ‘Overlord’: clearly not another raid on a ball-bearing factory.55
Many historians have erroneously claimed that the two American beach names – ‘Omaha’ and ‘Utah’ – were associated with the V and VII Corps commanders, but this cannot be right, for Leonard T. Gerow was born and brought up in Virginia, while J. Lawton Collins hailed from Louisiana. In fact, the historical record has been curiously silent on the origins of these names. However, in 2008 an explanation was offered in a US newspaper, whose attention had been drawn to an old notebook belonging to a former soldier stationed in Bradley’s London headquarters.
The jottings revealed how PFC Gayle Eyler, from Omaha, Nebraska, had been assigned in 1943 to the Headquarters Company supporting the staff of General Omar Bradley at 20 Bryanston Square. (The general described his offices as ‘a row of fashionable West End flats with fireplaces of Italian marble, ornate rococo ceilings. Now the windows were curtained. An assortment of GI tables and field desks crowded the drawing room. Its walls were papered with Top Secret maps.’)56 Eyler and a fellow carpenter from Provo, Utah, were the security-cleared GIs who demolished interior walls and set up plywood screens onto which Bradley’s maps were hung.
According to Eyler’s notebook, they often queued for doughnuts and coffee with senior commanders and, once, Bradley – known as the GI’s general – asked where the two soldiers hard at work in his office were from. Later on, they were invited to rest their coffee cups on a table with Eisenhower and Bradley, who were discussing the naming of landing areas; apparently it was then that Bradley suggested ‘Omaha and Utah – for your hard work getting the place ready in a hurry’. It is an intriguing addendum to history, but impossible to verify. Certainly, Amendment No. 1 dated 3 March 1944 changed all references of ‘beaches X-Ray and Yoke to Utah and Omaha’ – which would have been about the time Churchill was admonishing those preparing to send Canadians to die on a beach called ‘Jelly’.57